In the unhappy but not unlikely event that the Geneva conference fails to bring a cease-fire in Indo-China, the United States may be forced to make up its mind whether it will intervene in the Southeast Asian conflict. Administration spokesmen have made it plain that intervention will not be undertaken except in cooperation with other countries. However, a large share of the military burden, even if not as large a share as in Korea, would have to be borne by the United States. And although the talk has been of limiting any American intervention to naval and air action, it is a question whether such a limitation could be made to stick much longer in Indo-China than it did in Korea.

If it comes to military intervention in Southeast Asia, the action will carry grave risks of deeper involvement—the risk of full-scale intervention if the original action is limited and, whether limited or not, always the risk that the war will spread beyond Indo-China. Should one or another of those risks become reality, and troops start moving to the Far East in large numbers, the Army would have to rely mainly on the draft for the required expansion of forces. At the same time, it would be taking steps to mobilize existing reserve contingents.

Even if events in Southeast Asia do not take the currently feared turn for the worse, persisting threats and tensions will make it necessary for government officials to press forward with efforts to find new and more satisfactory means of building and maintaining an adequate reserve of trained military manpower. Various steps to that end already have been taken. The importance of pushing the task is underlined by the recurrent crises through which the world is passing and by the prospect that the nation's need to hold itself in military readiness will be as urgent tomorrow as it is today.